


The foreign fear tastes like terror

by ChaosKatsudon



Series: Sneering Acorn [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Fae & Fairies, Harry Potter Has a Twin, Wrong Boy-Who-Lived (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:26:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28838505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChaosKatsudon/pseuds/ChaosKatsudon
Summary: Theodore Nott’s best friend could best be described as ‘different’. His best friend’s brother could only be described as scary as hell. And Theo himself could only be described as the only one with some amount of self-preservation in this castle full of magical idiots. His best friend however was rather intelligent, and Theo made it his goal this year to teach the boy how to survive.The third book has arrived. Harry and Luna continue to be cryptids, while Alex and Theo are just absolutely done eith everyone's shit. the wild seems to get closer and closer...Disclaimer: I'm not J.K.Rowling so everything you recognize isn't mine. Unless you recognize them from the previous parts.
Series: Sneering Acorn [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2111436
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	The foreign fear tastes like terror

**Author's Note:**

> hiiiiii, so i'm pretty sure that i won't post this fast in the future, but heyyy gotta go with the flow when it's there. 
> 
> big thanks to my beta sopapilla8 who continues to amaze me. (the title is her doing and i love it) also a big thanks to my bookmarks, you can ask sopapilla i was literally screaming ahshahga
> 
> forgive me for my little moment of being salty and showing house pride in the end teehee. now enjoyyy and read the tags pls to be sure not to read anything you won't like or can't handle. much love, kats

Theodore Nott’s best friend could best be described as ‘different’. His best friend’s brother could only be described as scary as hell. And Theo himself could only be described as the only one with some amount of self-preservation in this castle full of magical idiots. His best friend however was rather intelligent, and Theo made it his goal this year to teach the boy how to survive. 

The whispers in the house were, for once, from a mortal source. The twins’ parents and parental figures always stopped as soon as either of the children entered the room, but the boys’ feelings and the other whispers drifting through the walls helped them piece together an essentially complete picture. Someone escaped the clutches of the personified fear and was now on the search for Alex. Traitorous. Revengeful. From what they heard, he wanted to finish his lord’s quest. Why the most powerful adult of their time was obsessed with killing a child, neither of them knew. 

“Are you in danger then?”, Harry asked with a glint in his eyes and a malicious smile on his lips. The two of them were sat in the attic, in between broken toys and pentagrams on the floor, the walls and the ceiling, and a surprising number of dead little animals. Alex didn’t answer his brother, simply staring at the earth in the corners. The older twin sighed, reaching out to gently press his finger against Alex’s cheeks as to force him to turn his head. The younger lifted an eyebrow. “Here.” Harry put an amulet attached to a leather string around his brother’s neck. The runes on the thin metal plate burned Alex’s skin until the boy felt the urge to scream. 

“It will save you one day. I saw it.”

Theo was glad to be back at Hogwarts. The situation at home had been tense, it had been ever since Theo’s father had found out that his son’s best friend was a half-blood. His father wasn’t a Death Eater. His reasons for blood supremacy were different, though no less dangerous or cutting. So yes, the heir of the house Nott was glad to be back at a place where the only cutting things were on his side. At least he was pretty sure that he was in Harry’s good books, if only for making his brother happy. Harry had a weird way of showing affection to his twin, but Theo could feel that Harry would never intentionally harm Alex. 

Speaking of his best friend, the boy had been very quiet since they had returned to their second home two weeks ago. It wasn’t unknown that Alex was someone who spoke did not often speak to strangers, but he was usually more talkative around his friend. Only when he told Theo about the dark, leaking walls at home, whispers of a murderer that he heard in his head, and burning amulettes that he was still wearing, did Theo understand. Of course, his summer had been even tenser than Nott’s. “We could pray?”, Theodore suggested. That was the first time they prayed to and for the wild. It felt right and wrong at the same time.

The Slytherins suffered under both cold and hot stares from the other houses. Even more so than usual. It was worse than when the school had thought one of the Slytherins was running around petrifying people and killing cats. It didn’t matter to anyone that the traitor, Peter Pettigrew, hadn’t belonged to the house of the silver snakes. Lions were the kings of their domains after all, so it had to be Slytherin’s fault that Peter acted as he had. Even if only indirectly. The Slytherins started to spend more and more time in their common room. Nobody except Alex saw how the room seemed to shrink and how the portraits disappeared from their frames. Nobody except Alex dreaded to go in there because of the increasing stench. Nobody but Alex feared that the sickness that had overtaken his house was coming to Hogwarts too. 

By Merlin, sometimes Alexander really hated his life. 

Harry hated Dementors. He hated them with more passion than he had ever felt in his life before. The Gryffindor was usually calm and mischievous and malicious and cunning and fearless and…so many other things, but he had never been hateful before. He knew that Luna hated the personified fears too. He knew it because of the way she drew protective runes on her hands that caused Alex to look away from her slender writing instruments. He knew it, because Luna told him of nightmares, with explosions and the song of the wild and her mother’s dying breath. Most importantly, he knew it because Luna whispered dark words to the creatures in the woods that loved her, hatred hidden behind her normal dreamy smile and equally as lifted voice. 

The son of the trees hated the Dementors for the things they did to him. He was was immune against Legilimency or the screams of mandrakes, so why couldn’t he be immune against the dark cloaks, floating around in the summer air? Harry wasn’t afraid. He didn’t feel fear. He wasn’t brave and he wasn’t chivalrous, but the absence of fear was what made him a Gryffindor. No, Harry wasn’t scared of the things he saw every time the dark creatures got too close. At best, he had an amused smile for them if they tried to feed on him and promptly floated away hastily, appalled by the foul taste he undoubtedly brought them. 

Harry hated them for what they made him see. He wasn’t scared of the visions, even if they hurt sometimes. He almost found comfort when he saw sneering trees and warm blood flowing through their veins. Of course, they were alive, after all, they were a part of his family. Those visions were okay. The ones that made him feel this new emotion were the nuisances. It was solely terribly inconvenient to see Alex’s broken form under some waterfall flowers or Luna’s empty eyes in the middle of twisted, broken branches. Sometimes, he hears the song of the wild in the way Alex hears it, causing him to press his hands to his ears and hope that it would pass as soon as possible. In those moments he understood why his brother was jealous of him. For the first time in Harry’s life, he began to actively avoid something. But no matter how far he ran, no matter how often he took Luna’s hand and pulled her away from the Thestrals and back to the castle, no matter how often he cursed the Dementors with words that burned the air in between them, they always seemed to find him. 

The boy loved flying. It was one of the only things that could pull him away from sitting in the woods, watching his brethren, and talking to Luna without a care in the world. Playing Quidditch felt like he was a bird, a dragon, and a wizard at the same time and Harry adored it. He had made the team, certainly, he had, he flew like he was born on a broom after all. Before every game, Luna and he burned feathers and soft dragon runes as a sacrifice to the clouds. It would guarantee him the win every time. The Ravenclaw was never conflicted, she cared little about her own house, only going back there to sleep and laugh when another ‘accident’ happened to one of her tormenters. 

The clouds were angry on the day of their match against Hufflepuff. They screamed and cried. Luna decidedly told Harry that she wouldn’t come to watch him play and skipped off. Harry really couldn’t care less about it. He had made his sacrifices and he knew that the clouds loved him almost as much as they did Neville, so what was there to be scared of? When Harry, one of the three chasers, scored yet another goal, he couldn’t help but look to the woods for their approval. A raven cried far away and the boy smiled slightly. It made him miss the arrival of the Dementors and he only realized when his hands let go of the broom and he was falling and falling. Down and down and down. 

“Not now”, a kind voice told the older twin, the sun lighting up the speaker’s face. They had beautiful, big horns that seemed too heavy for their head and wings, so translucent and small that they didn’t seem like they were able to hold the person’s weight. Harry blinked, big, green eyes meeting his own eyes. He blinked again, but now the eyes of the person with the kind voice proceeded to look like the killing curse. Or acidic apples. Harry didn’t ask anything, he said nothing at all. “I miss you, you know?”, the person stated gently and for a moment, Harry could ignore the way they smelled. Of magical water, the kiss of the sun, and the scream of a fairy. Sadly, they were only a Dementor vision anyway, right? 

Gryffindor won the match when Ginny caught the snitch. 

Snow tasted like Yule around this time of year. Draco knew that he was probably being overly poetic, but how couldn’t he be when two of his best friends were cryptics that more often than not spoke in code. Hogsmeade was beautiful and just the right size to spend an afternoon there. Draco was sat on a bench he’d cleared with a muttered spell, sipping on the butterbeer he had gotten to go. He couldn’t help but lament the fact that he was there alone. The small village was full of couples, and even if most of them were older than him, thirteen was still the age Draco had decided to notice how attractive some people were. With some people, he was talking about Harrison Potter. The boy’s slender form, his poisonous eyes, and the mouth that spoke nonsense most of the time did something to Draco. Just a harmless little crush. The fluttering of birds in his stomach, birds that were more alive than the ones he and Blaise had found near the edge of the forest. A harmless little crush that was paired with healthy fear at the same time. The air tasted of adventure. 

“Oh, a pretty unicorn.”

Trelawney foretold their early demise about four times each class. It made Theo laugh when he told Alex about it, who took Arithmancy instead. Alex found it much less amusing because no matter how much of a fool Dumbledore was, he surely would not hire a fraud. The words of seers weighed heavy and they were, in some way or another, always true. Alex started a list with everyone she threatened with their impertinent death. Then again, Trelawney only reeked of the wild when she turned the wrong way and Alex could see that her eyes were purple and not the watery blue they decided to be. It happened only once every full moon, however. Simultaneously to when Remus, who had taken up teaching for fun, disappeared into the woods and only came out after the howling stopped. Alex turned the other way whenever the two teachers decided to act strange, ignoring the way Harry watched from across the great hall, a sharp kind of calculation in his eyes. 

The younger twin also turned the other way when someone even mentioned the electives ‘Runes’ or ‘Care of Magical Creatures’. As much as he would have found them more interesting than ‘Muggle Studies’, he preferred the quiet, safe class. He closed his eyes in exhaustion when someone whispered about the way Harry had stared at the Hippogriff and scared him away, or about the rumour that Harry had burned down his table, simply by altering a rune the slightest bit. He ignored any questions regarding the incidents since he knew them to be true, and he knew that Theo knew too in the way that his best friend locked eyes with him every time something happened. Alex was so very done with his brother’s antics. 

He would lie if someone asked him why he burnt one of the mandrakes in a sea of salt.

Hermione preferred the solitude of her little corner in the library to going outside. Her only friend was Ron after all, and while he was loyal to a fault and brought a laugh out of her more times than not, he still got a bit much for her sometimes. Strange things were happening around the two green-eyed boys and while almost nobody else seemed to ever see the signs, ‘Mione saw them. She had read many books over the summer. Mostly fairy-tales, muggle ones, that is. Tales of changed children and terrible things happening to their families. Tales of sacrifices. She kept close to Harry throughout the year, at least when she wasn’t busy laughing with her best friend or studying. She watched when he suddenly spoke to an empty corner, or when his hand carelessly brushed over the wall and left a rune behind. She watched when he talked to Luna in a language that she couldn’t hope to comprehend, a language that made her ears ring and her nails curl. 

Hermione knew a lot of interesting things. 

When Theo had followed Alex outside in the dark, he hadn’t expected to be held at the tip of a wand by the end of the night. The man, who intercepted them before they got to the clearing where Alex claimed the fairies danced at midnight in a full moon night, was thin and haughty and dangerous. He smelled of fear and pride, and Theo could see Alex lazily blinking at his hands around Theo’s neck, which was not helping at all. Honestly, he cursed himself for not trying to teach Alex more self-preservation. Self-preservation, which would have stopped them from going out in the dark, just because Alex told him tales of jealousy. Theo really, really wanted to do the sensible thing and run, but he couldn’t move, frozen in fear that wasn’t even his. He heard the scream of a centaur not far away and it made Alex smile. 

“Peter”, a curious voice stated, having known the man’s name like he knew Nicholas’. The two were intertwined, Harry could feel it in his bones. Today was the day they would learn about the foreign name on the tip of his tongue. At least if Peter decided to be civil and let go of the extra boy Harry only tolerated because he made Alex laugh. “Peter”, Harry’s brother repeated unimpressed and the older twin smiled a smile full of glittering teeth. The creature in the dark had told him the name, and Harry had thanked him by leaving behind butterflies in the corners. The acidic snow coloured eyes had blinked and giggled. “Peter?”, Theo croaked from within the man’s hold and Harry could taste his fear in the air. No…not his, but… It confused him too much. 

Alex wanted to go and sleep. Or see the fairies dance. Everything but standing there and watching Harry twist and turn yet another bad situation in his favour. Peter, surprised by the three calling him by his name, had let go of Theo. The Slytherin had bared his teeth at Alex and had run away. Alex didn’t blame him. He would whisper the tales of this night to his best friend later when they were both safely in their dormitory. He was used to Theo having more common sense than both the Potters together. Or rather, more sense than whoever decided to stand in Harry’s path. “How do you know my name?” The Potters didn’t answer, one of them busy feeling sorry for himself and the world, the other one idly playing with his wand. 

“Talk”, Harry said eventually. 

Not a lot of things scared Peter more than the thought of going back to Azkaban. It was a reasonable fear, for fear itself lurked behind every corner in the prison. But sitting here, watching the two things with the Avada Kedavra eyes watch him in return, had to be the most bizarre and dangerous situation in Peter’s life. And yes, he was scared. He was scared of the madness he could hear in the younger boy, the same madness that Bella showed when she cried. He was scared of the careless malice in the older boy that reminded him too much of a man in his past. Yet, he didn’t show said fear when he told the boys his tale. It was the bare truth, so naked that he could feel the ghosts in the air hating him for it. He would never lie to those two…creatures. They felt like creatures. 

When Lily had told him about the blood ritual, Peter had felt euphoric for the first time since he had been sorted into a house he didn’t belong to. It was a brilliant idea, really, fitting for a brilliant young witch like her. He had sobbed the night after she had told him, convinced that his sacrifice would finally pay off. Spying for the Dark Lord was not an easy feat, especially when magic rejected his offering of burnt corn. Unlucky, some might call him. The secret of the Potters hideout never left Peter’s lips around Voldemort. No, the snakes told him. Purity overrides magic and Peter was confused, as was magic herself. That night, magic hid behind the wild and Voldemort killed himself by ignoring purity’s tries to stop him from walking into the trap of a blood ritual. 

Alex was more confused now than he had been before. He had gotten used to the way Harry described the things he saw or didn’t describe the things he saw, but Peter’s words were as unreal as Nargles were for Alex. Harry however simply tilted his head, acting, or maybe truly understanding what Peter was babbling about. “Who’s Nicholas?”, he asked, and the world froze. For the first time in his life, Alex heard the wild sing like Harry did, while Harry pressed his hands to his ears. The moment was gone as fast as it had come, but only after an eternity, and Luna, as well as Hermione, jolted awake in the castle. Peter smiled the smile of the fair, before answering.

“Nicholas is…was my godson.” 

Peter told them about Nicholas Peter Potter, their brother, while both the boys fidgeted on the stone they were sitting on. Hearing his full name and the story of his sacrifice made him so real that both stopped breathing. They were well aware of the hovering form with the horns and the wings near them, even if they could neither see it nor hear its delighted giggles. Nature around them was dancing and singing and frolicking. None of the three figures huddled together in a clearing far from the world of magic realized just which impact it had that the two boys now know that name. The full name. Nobody would know until the very last battle when the faith of all the living beings would be decided. Only the shadows knew, the invisible ghosts, and the small acorn that had grown into a monster. 

The sound of a werewolf howling had one face contort in fear, one face blink tiredly, and one face twist into a smile. “We need to go”, Peter urged, the terror making his voice ran away. Time seemed to slow down to an excruciating pace, but still, it was too late. The creature of the moon, looking broken and wrong, entered the clearing. Alex cast a Notice-me-not-charm, and even if he felt the cruel magic fight against him, he knew that it was the strongest charm he had ever cast in his life. It didn’t matter, however, because Remus had seen Peter. Even if his mind was twisted by the poison that made him this creature once every month, he realized that it was Peter. Peter the traitor. Peter, who had cost them so much. Maybe it was because of Snape’s potion that made him somewhat clearer in his head, or maybe it was because Petter stunk of rat…whatever it was, Peter was no more. 

When the werewolf had finally left the clearing that now lay under thick, yellow fog, the two boys sighed simultaneously. “We should really stop almost dying”, Harry remarked, lazily flicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He sounded as amused as he always did when something terrible happened. “And we should stop watching people die”, Alex answered impassively, leveling Harry with a glare that lacked any heat. “We should”, Harry agreed without agreeing and the two of them slowly made their way back to school. Nature around them was still having a blast. 

“Nicholas Peter Potter, huh”, Harry murmured dreamily. 

For once, the twins weren’t in the middle of attention at the end of the school year. Remus had told his tale, much shorter than the Potters could have told it, leaving the twins completely out of it, since he could simply not remember them being there. He had never seen them after all, Alex was too much of a talented wizard, far ahead of his age. The school sighed in relief. The threat of a murderer was gone once again, at least until it wasn’t. For now, however, everyone was safe, right? Everyone agreed and the feast at the end of the year was happy, decked in yellow and black. Without the points they would have gotten in another universe, Gryffindor was just one of four houses. 

“Are you looking forward to the summer?”, Theo asked, even if he knew the answer. Alex didn’t answer, he simply turned green eyes to the window. He really hoped that the walls would stop leaking, he really didn’t like the development of his home. Home. A strange word. “I think Hogwarts is my home”, he remarked and Theo didn’t have to ask why. He simply nodded and the boys went back to playing chess, ignoring the growing pile of earth in the corner of their compartment. 

No living soul would ever know Peter Pettigrew’s real story, except for two raven-haired boys and their two best friends and maybe, just maybe, the creature in the shadows that for once, approved of something.


End file.
